Last week, the Libyan legislature formally requested Egypt’s military intervention in its civil war—a request its Egyptian counterpart assented to yesterday. Cairo has for some time supported the Libyan legislature, and the warlord Khalifa Haftar, in their ongoing conflict with the country’s president and his Government of National Accord (GNA). Simultaneously, Turkey has been increasing its support for the GNA. Jonathan Spyer describes this explosive situation:

A cluster of additional international players are gathered around the two warring sides. The GNA has the additional support of Qatar and Italy. Haftar, meanwhile, enjoys the backing of the United Arab Emirates, Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.

The events in Libya reflect the depth and intensity of one of the key strategic rivalries in the Middle East. This is the contest between the camp consisting of Turkey, Qatar, and a variety of Muslim Brotherhood-associated forces in the region, including Hamas’s Gaza fiefdom, and the rival [entente] of Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. There are, of course, other elements engaged in the complex Libyan strategic space. But these two camps are the central players. [The] GNA in Tripoli and Haftar and his allies in the eastern part of the country are their respective proxies.

This rivalry is not solely geostrategic. It relates also to modes of governance. Turkey had hoped to emerge at the head of a bloc of democratically elected Islamist governments in the region, following the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2010. For a while, things seemed to be going well. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in 2011 was the high point. Turkey strongly backed the government of Mohamed Morsi. It similarly threw its weight behind the Sunni Islamist insurgents in Syria. For a moment, the prospect of a bloc of Sunni Islamist governance stretching from Ankara to Cairo (and incidentally, threatening Israel from north and south) looked like a real possibility.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.